You may recall that Petro Poroshenko had tried really hard to derail Trump’s campaign. Like his Italian counterpart Matteo Renzi, he put all his eggs in the Hillary basked and is now fighting for his (doomed) career.

But recently, the Congress, sensing Trump’s aversion to Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, who tried to derail his campaign, gave Trump a gift in the form of a healthy cut to the aid package it had intended to send to Kiev to kill hapless citizens there. Why do Americans not protest this lethal aid to paid killers? I will never understand it.

Meanwhile, sizing up the situation in the US, Putin decided to recognize official docs, eg, passports issued in Novorossia, thereby raising the status of these people closer to an internationally recognized independent region or nation.

Around this time, perhaps smelling blood in the water, the E. Ukraine pro-Russian republics of Lugansk and Donetsk decided to pull a fast one on Kiev – which had been shelling civilians in their territory for years and had been promised lethal aid by the US mafia known as Congress — and call their bluff. It seems Kiev had blockaded roads and railroads into and out of the Lugansk and Donbass People’s Republics in an effort to bring these runaways to heel. But instead the pro-Russians outsmarted these ninnies, an easy enough feat. They issued an ultimatum and said that if the Kiev government did not lift the blockade by a certain date, they would seize the major businesses and industries in their territory (they called it “external management” but it was a seizure, ie, nationalization of the industries). Now it seems these industries were vital to pay taxes, feed Western Ukraine and make Ukaine’s filthy-rich filthy-richer. You’d think a regime with normal intelligence would take this seriously and sit down to bargain with the rebels. But the entire world is still living in the past, when any regime anywhere, no matter how corrupt, could snap its fingers and get US aid for anti-Russian actions. And Ukraine rivals Haiti in corruption. But not this time, Kiev. Not only does the EU not want any parts of you, but the US is getting fed up with your sniveling, whining Poroshenko.

The ultimatum deadline came and went and the Lugansk and Donbass leaders [President Igor Plotnitsky in Lugansk, Prime Minister Aleksander Zakharchenko in Donbass] kept their word. They seized the factories and immediately offered items like coal and other energy to Russia and others, in order to keep bread on the table. Now Western Ukraine gets to starve, just as it wanted E. Ukraine to starve – tit for tat. NOW, however, the Kiev government is faced with a humanitarian crisis of the kind it imposed on the rebels. What went around came around. McCain and Soros were fighting like mad to achieve that lethal aid to kill civilians in Donbass and Lugansk. But they, as well as their partner in crime, Petro Petroshenko, are left with a well-deserved punishment of their own making.

Redneck pickup trucks used to travel thru my old rural neighborhood with bumper stickers emblazoned with the words: Payback is a b—tch.

The long-awaited meeting between Petro Poroshenko and Donald Trump, expected to take place late last month, never materialized. Instead, the leaders ended up holding telephone talks, details of which remained undisclosed. Ukrainian observers are concerned that Trump’s cold shoulder indicates that Washington’s patronage for Kiev is coming to an end.

The introduction in the LDPR of external control of former facilities of the Ukrainian oligarchs can pose a serious threat to the regime in Kiev if the Republics are able to demonstrate a higher economic growth than Ukraine, believes Vasily Volga, the leader of the «Union of Left Forces» and the former deputy of the Verkhovnaya Rada.

If this experiment fits into the system of international payments and budget forming enterprises of the DPR [Donetsk People’s Republic] and LPR [Lugansk People’s Republic] begin to work for the budgets of the Republics with a population of no more than 3 million people, their budget will double the budget of Kiev where almost 4 million people live.

It may happen that these two small unrecognized republics, which are now experiencing enormous difficulties in the social sphere, will turn into something that can be compared to Catalonia in Spain. The DPR and LPR can become the leaders in GDP per capita. This will allow the authorities of these republics to maintain a level of social security, that Ukraine has never dreamed of.

Yesterday, there was a real panic in Kiev. The Cabinet window were lit all night. There is one meeting after another there, and no one knows what to do about all this. It turns out that in the case of a real blockade, Ukraine is unable to survive not only without Russia, but even without Donetsk and Lugansk.

God forbid, there will be interruptions in the single energy complex. We have very high risks operating NPPs [nuclear power plants – Don]. In addition, last year the DPR and LPR paid 34 billion USD, if I’m not mistaken, to the Ukrainian budget. The loss of such a sum is an enormous loss for Ukraine, especially now that we have almost lost the right to the international credit. Moreover, we are still burdened with the court decision on payment of the so-called Yanukovich debt.

We are now witnessing interesting things. States do not die immediately – bang, they collapse – they die gradually. Of course, in historical retrospect, this occurs instantly. A few years for the state is a moment for man. But death within several years is what we are observing now.

I have recently had an opportunity to travel in Ukraine – the collapse of the transport infrastructure is reaching a peak. The majority of Ukrainian roads are not just worn out, they simply do not exist. The same thing is happening in the energy sector. Scheduled maintenance has not been conducted for three years, and such scheduled preventive maintenance is required on a quarterly basis.

Of course, we will live somehow. People lived somehow in the primitive communal system; they survived by gathering, dug up and ate roots. But our problem is that we live in an area saturated with high-tech facilities. If they are not maintained, if the state does not have the funds for it and the energy sector does not have enough power, we may end up not with gathering, but with rolling man-made disasters which will follow rolling blackouts.

In Ukraine, they talk about the stabilization, but it is a stabilization when, say, they have reached the bottom and, all of a sudden, there is a knock from beneath – I mean the LDPR [Lugansk-Donetsk People’s Republics] blockade.

The Republics of Donbass, whose documents had been recognized by Russia the day before, go on the offensive.

Today, the LDPR authorities have put forward an ultimatum to official Kiev: if by Wednesday, March 1st, the blockade undertaken by the Ukrainian radicals is not stopped, Lugansk and Donetsk will nationalize all enterprises under the Ukrainian jurisdiction and redirect them to the cooperation with the Russian Federation.

This is announced in a joint statement by Igor Plotnitsky and Alexander Zakharchenko.

‘Using the radicals, Kiev has organized and is continuing the blockade of railways, and threatening to block the road communication between the Republics of Donbass and Ukraine. This directly contradicts the spirit and letter of the Minsk Agreements and, in principle, characterizes the current authorities of Ukraine as unable to take care of the citizens. Many enterprises have been forced to stop their work as a result of the criminal actions of the Kiev authorities.

We have to declare that if by 00:00 on Wednesday (March 1st, 2017), the blockade is not lifted, we will introduce external management at all enterprises under the Ukrainian jurisdiction, working in the DPR and LPR. We will stop supplying coal to Ukraine. There is neither the capacity nor the payment scheme for the coal supply. We will re-construct all the production processes and direct them to the market of Russia and other countries. This was one of our first program promises at the time of the proclamation of our Republics,’ the document says.

I wonder if you will recall that the GW Bush wars were started by rah rah talk, as when Dubbya stood at ground zero and, with his arms draped around two NY firemen, proclaimed “the people who knocked down these buildings are going to hear from us.”

So ask yourself: Did “the people who knocked down these buildings” really hear from us? Now every American who experienced that moment lived through the wars that followed. But remember that the “people who knocked down these buildings” were mostly Saudis because it was they who founded and funded – together with the US Deep State – Al-Qaeda. But instead of declaring war on the Saudis, our real enemy, we attacked the enemies of our enemy, the Taliban (which had around that time plotted to oust the Saudi royals) and Saddam, who ran a secular type government with little or no emphasis on Shariah and even had a Christian in his cabinet. The Saudis hate secular leaders and the US helps them eliminate them. (Here is a clue as to why we are so obliging to them: http://laiglesforum.com/how-the-petrodollar-perpetuates-islamic-terror-2/3315.htm).

Thus, absurdly, Dubbya was aiding and abetting the “people who knocked down these buildings” and killed up to 3000 Americans. And he and his Neocon pals had to know that the Christians and other large groups would leave Iraq in droves if we “won,” and that chaos would ensue, forcing the US to occupy.

And how about that Afghanistan? What a great victory! Rah rah. Not. US and allied troops are still there and the carnage is heart-wrenching – for all but the arms industry and its financiers.

Thus we can state with confidence that, facing the TV cameras at ground zero that day, George W. Bush was thumbing his nose at a bleeding America. (This fits in perfectly with Bush’s cover-up of the Saudi role in 9-11 as reported subsequently by the Washington Post ).

Now with that deception in mind, you will note the unbridled euphoria over the Trump election. Rah rah. Millions of Americans were relieved that we would now have peace.

And in fact, we might.

But we might not either.

Yes, Donald Trump had promised he would cooperate with Russia. The prospect of peace that this signaled is one important reason many Democrats crossed over to vote for him, for example.

But what many of us have forgotten is the eerily similar rah rah moments of the Bush years and what rah rah moments usually mean in our great country. The greatness often lies solely in the rah rah, not in the situation on the ground, in the aftermath, our bleeding hearts and pocket books.

Some exceptionally alert observers are already pointing out that Trump has picked two rank Neocons for his cabinet, who have both warned about “Russian aggression” in Ukraine, despite the fact that it was the US and Europe who started and supported the bloody coup in Kiev for the obvious purpose of goading Russia into a defensive action that could be spun by our media into “aggression.”

Trump’s presumptive defense secretary has warned that the Russian “aggression” in Ukraine is “worse than we think.” This is a lie, as you know if you follow the web site that provides regular sitreps on the conflict in E. Ukraine. Bookmark this site and go there at least once a week. If enough Americans did, our “leaders” would not dare arm the Kiev fascists. Even, if you followed the OSCE’s regular Ukraine reports, you would also know the aggressor is Kiev’s troops (many of which are fascists, eg, the Azov Battalion) that the US government supports.

But Mattis is not the only one beating the war drums against the country Trump promised to “cooperate with.” Mike Pompeo, Trump’s pick for CIA director, recently returned from a trip to Kiev, and after fruitful discussions with the Neo-Nazis there, says that “Putin’s aim is to take over Ukraine” (Mike would have fit in nicely in a Clinton cabinet) , implying that Russia wants to attack Ukraine militarily. If that were true, Putin would have done the job a long time ago before NATO had deployed troops all over Eastern Europe, including 30,000 at the Russian borders (reminding Russians of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa that destroyed much of Russia and killed millions of Russians). No one is saying that a Ukraine thoroughly disgruntled with US and EU lies, like the false promise to let the country join the EU, might not voluntarily ally itself with Russia. It would be hard to paint that as Russian aggression, but recent anti-Russian (hence racist) drivel from the Western msm shows that no lie is too big for the warmongering elites to manage.

The latest E. Ukraine (Novorossia is the real name) sitrep shows that the Neo-Fascist sympathizers the US government supports in Kiev are now recruiting Lumpenproletariat, common thugs, with promises of free land, stolen from Russian speakers.

Now we are at another crossroads, another rah rah moment in American history. The euphoria over the Trump victory is great. Many are willing to go along with anything this leader wants. Like Bush, the Evangelicals have anointed him as God’s servant. The chessboard is arrayed exactly as before.

The question is: will you forget the lessons that Dubbya taught us and say to yourself: this time is different and the rah rah heralds a better world? Or will you recognize the rah rah moment for what it is: a time for you to say “not this time!”?

Postscript:

Writing for a news and opinion site is an endless job, as it should and must be. Since this was written, Trump is reportedly eyeing shifty arch-Neocon Mitt Romney for the position of Secretary of State.

So what’s wrong with that you ask? Here is a video featuring Mitt saying “Russia is our worst geopolitical foe” who always “lines up with the world’s worst actors”, among whom he counts Assad, the most pro-Christian leader in the Middle East, who is fighting for his country’s life against Al-Qaeda and ISIS, groups that are armed and trained by our “ally” Saudi Arabia.

Trump has said he will cooperate with the same Putin that Romney has spent much of his career smearing.

Before interviewing Petro Poroshenko on 9/25/2016, CNN’s Fareed Zakariah had made ads for the show suggesting that Petroshenko is an “authority” on Vladimir Putin because, supposedly, “no one knows Putin better than Poroshenko.” In fact no one but the Russian people, who confer on Putin an over 80% popularity rating, truly know their president, whom they adore. So if Fareed wanted people to really know Putin, then why did they choose as an authority a man who considers Putin his worst enemy, who has only met with Putin a few times and has mainly discussed the aftermath of a disaster created by Western meddling aimed at harming Putin and Russia? Well, let’s see: we are on the eve of the presidential debates and the only motive for choosing the anti-Putin Poroshenko would be to give the US people a distorted image of Putin. Why? Because Donald Trump is perceived as being pro-Putin and CNN sees it as their mission to have Trump defeated. I doubt if their viewers are unaware of this duplicitous strategy. I saw through it instantly – with great aversion.

Secondly, Poroshenko claims that there are x-number of Russian troops on “Ukrainian” soil. That is not true. There are none.

Let me explain:

1—Ukraine does not have a legitimate government in Kiev. The so-called “government” there is the heir to an illegitimate regime under Yatseniuk, who was hand-picked by Victoria Nuland of the US Department of State – as revealed by a now-notorious phone conversation proving that it was the US, and not the Ukrainian people, who installed an anti-Russian current government (this is based on a transcript leaked to the BBC, as reported here), of which Poroshenko is an extension. Not only did the US government install Yatseniuk as president but it also, along with George Soros and other Western actors, was deeply involved in the bloody illegal Maidan coup. Fareed himself interviewed George Soros personally in May of 2014 and in that program, Soros admitted that he was involved, as I showed here in an extensive analysis of Soros’ remarks to Fareed. Obviously, if the Maidan coup had been the spontaneous grass-roots movement that it was billed as, there would have been no need for foreign intervention. Yet several European heads of state and officials were there, including German foreign minister Steinmeier. Obviously they did not go because they knew the coup would succeed without them and their agitation. Therefore, the current government in Kiev is not a properly and democratically elected Ukrainian government but rather a foreign government installed by subterfuge and controlled by the US and its anti-Russian allies. It is therefore illegitimate and should be disbanded.

2—Novorossia is not part of the Ukraine. It is a Russian speaking region that was part of the pre-coup Ukraine but now has its own government and its own military. In the same way as Scotland was allowed a referendum to determine its own fate, Novorossia is entitled to determine its own future course and is being illegally denied that right by the Western Establishment. The US-led illegitimate Kiev government deliberately provoked the Russian speakers in what is now Novorossia (Donbass, Lugansk) by denying them the official use of their native language, Russian, causing them to wish to split from Ukraine. Their demonstrations were met by military responses, including murder of citizens by aerial bombardments and assassinations, by the Kiev government, which are ongoing today, as shown at this site, which provides regular updates of Kiev’s violation of the Minsk treaties and ceasefires.

The US and the Kiev regime knew full well that this ban on the Russian language would be offensive to people who had been using Russian in their homes, in their schools, in their local government, on street signs and in official documents of all kinds.

To add insult to injury, Kiev collaborated with groups, such as the Azov battalion, which had ties to the German Nazis in the Ukraine and helped exterminate the Ukrainian Jews. Kiev’s ties to these fascists are extremely offensive to Russians, whose country was practically devastated by the Nazis and lost 11 million soldiers, between 7 and 20 million civilians, and billions of dollars worth of industrial capacity, precious monuments and art treasures, to the Nazis – but also managed to kill 4 times as many Nazis as the rest of the allies combined. To the Russian people, seeing the fascist fighters of US-backed Kiev killing Russian speakers was as if the Western allies had suddenly sided with Hitler. The Washington Post, in a rare report less critical of Russia than usual, recounts this story, closing it with:

“…we shouldn’t forget how the Soviets won World War II in Europe.”

While the highly unpopular US puppet Petro smears Putin, arguably the world’s most popular national leader, as dishonest, he Poroshenko is the dishonest one because he denies the crucially important reality expressed in this point and in point no. 1 above.

Speaking of dishonesty, Poroshenko’s government pretends that it no longer is responsible for the payment of its debt for gas supplies because of alleged Russian involvement with the Novorossian military. That is not true. The real reason that Kiev will not pay is because the corrupt Ukraine government and business class have bankrupted the country and they simply cannot afford to pay this debt.

Thus the reality that Fareed Zakaria carefully shields his audience from is that Poroshenko is an illegitimate, and very unpopular leader (see this International Business Times article), and that the bait that was offered to the Ukrainians to induce them to execute their Maidan coup was precisely something that is no longer available to them, namely, EU membership. They were cheated.

There are several reasons why EU membership is not available to Ukraine:

—The country, as detailed above, is insolvent and would represent a burden on the already foundering EU, which has since lost one of its key members and tax payers, ie, the UK

—The EU is tearing apart at the seams, with several insolvent member states, an insolvent Deutsche Bank, and a host of third parties in member states that, if able to gain control, will give the people referendums on leaving the EU. If – or rather when – even one more major state exits, the EU will collapse.

—One crucial reason for this vulnerability of the EU is the policy of forcing member states to accept refugee quotas, despite the extreme unpopularity of this policy.

—Another reason for the EU’s vulnerability is the Russia sanctions policy imposed on the EU by the US, which has caused a deep rift in Europe, whose businesses are losing millions as a result of this policy. German businesses are lobbying hard for an end to the sanctions against Russia, as reported by the WSJ.

Poroshenko has been presiding over a country that has lost significant territory and seen double-digit negative economic growth since it began allowing the US to write national policies that deliberately provoke Russia (in a fruitless effort to isolate Russia) and what is now known as Novorossia.

Putin presides over a country that had a GDP of 1,362 billion in 2015 at a population of 146 million.

The GDP per capita of Ukraine was 2,824 USD in 2015 (down from 3,123 the previous year), compared to 9,000 USD in Russia in 2015, or about 3 times less – despite sanctions.

So you can argue over whose fault the Ukrainian failure is, but one thing remains certain: The country that decided to go its own way is arguably 3 times better off economically than the country whose leaders dragged it into a proxy war on the US side. Back when Ukraine was trading freely with Russia, it was still struggling but at least it was solvent. Now, after US meddling, it can no longer pay its debts.

And whether or not Poroshenko is an authority on Putin, yesterday’s CNN interview is still a case of the mouse jumping the cat.